CCSD Wasted Enough Money to Hire 1,000 Teachers – Every Single Year
A new efficiency study commissioned by Clark County School District Superintendent Jhone Ebert reveals that CCSD could save up to $34 million in its first year of implementation – and as much as $79 million annually within five years.
That's not a rounding error. That's real money that should have been going into classrooms.
The report, conducted by Gibson Consulting Group and presented to the CCSD Board of School Trustees on June 3, identified six key areas of operational waste: software licensing mismanagement, inefficient transportation routing, deferred preventive maintenance, outdated construction standards, energy overuse, and uncollected federal indirect cost reimbursements.
Take the transportation finding alone.
CCSD has been reserving a seat on every bus for every eligible student – whether those students show up or not.
The result? Buses rolling half-empty across the valley at full cost. Switching to an opt-in system could save $9 million right away, growing to $18 million a year by 2030.
Or consider this: CCSD spent $83.4 million on electricity, gas, and water last year.
The report found the district isn't even benchmarking its energy usage to catch waste. That's like leaving the lights on in every empty classroom and calling it a budget crisis.
And software?
CCSD has been paying for licenses it doesn't track, doesn't consolidate, and apparently doesn't manage. Fixing that alone could save $11.25 million annually within five years.
Here's the question nobody in Carson City wants to answer: where has my opponent been?
Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop has been in the Nevada Legislature since 2008.
She chaired the joint subcommittee on K-12 education and the Department of Education budget just last year.
She positions herself as the education candidate.
She's won awards from the Nevada Association of School Superintendents.
Her entire political identity is built around public schools.
And yet – the last time CCSD conducted an efficiency study like this one was 2011. That's 15 years!
Fifteen years of empty buses. Fifteen years of untracked software licenses. Fifteen years of reactive maintenance instead of preventive maintenance. Fifteen years of leaving federal reimbursement money on the table.
Sen. Dondero Loop didn't demand this study. Superintendent Ebert commissioned it herself.
It took a new superintendent – not a longtime incumbent legislator – to finally ask the basic question: are we spending this money wisely?
The answer, apparently, is no.
Look, I'm not here to pile on CCSD employees. The teachers, the bus drivers, the maintenance workers – they show up and do the job.
The failure here is at the oversight level.
It's the job of legislators, especially those who sit on education budget committees, to ask hard questions about how the money is being spent. Not just appropriate more of it.
Nevada consistently ranks near the bottom nationally in education outcomes. Democrats like Sen. Dondero Loop respond to that fact by calling for more spending.
But if the district is sitting on $79 million a year in preventable waste, the problem was never just the funding level. The problem was the management – and the lack of legislative accountability that allowed the mismanagement to go unchallenged for over a decade.
When I get to Carson City, I'll be asking these kinds of questions before the first dollar gets appropriated. Because the families in Senate District 8 deserve a senator who fights for results – not just a bigger budget line.
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